


A Redeemer

by Grimmy88



Series: Odd Couple [2]
Category: Outlast (Video Games), Outlast: Whistleblower - Fandom
Genre: F/M, M/M, Mentions of Violence, mentions of rape/non-con
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-10
Updated: 2018-01-19
Packaged: 2018-03-11 10:54:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3324881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Grimmy88/pseuds/Grimmy88
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the sequel to 'A Gentleman.'</p>
<p>Waylon Park has escaped Mount Massive Asylum with Eddie Gluskin in tow. He, Eddie, and his camera will be his primary weapons against the remaining Murkoff Corporation, until every last bit of what they suffered is exposed.</p>
<p>He expects to gain nothing and lose everything, but when has the world given Waylon Park what he's wanted lately?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OnlySnakesCanLove](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OnlySnakesCanLove/gifts).



“Are you dying?”

The initial shock that overtakes a body after injury, rendering pain and lucidity mute, had ebbed early in their drive.

Waylon had been elbowed in the nose once. Well, he’d caught an elbow; he’d never been a willing participant in a fight in all his life. The dull burn of pain that had burst from the center of his face outward had quelled quick enough with only the thump of blood through angry veins. What he felt in his leg was similar enough to that—drugs and antibiotics had helped—but not entirely. There was that deep throb to it, accompanied by a searing offshoot that seemed to tug on every nerve and muscle all while hammering about with the marrow in his bone.

If that was pain, then the hole in his side was agony. He’d kept his hand pressed firm to his side, but it burned and pulsed. Sometimes those pulses would release a slippery trail of weight over his fingers which his brain knew as blood but his senses could not distinguish as liquid due to the coats of red they’d already endured. They were less now, though, but he had no delusion that was a good thing.

He knew there was a hospital nearby, and truthfully he wished he could’ve driven further to find any other town. Of course the staff at Mount Massive had been capable, but they never would have built the place too far from a larger medical facility. So far there’d been only one road to traverse, and it had given him a sign, but each moment drew longer than the last and each stretch of asphalt turned all the blurrier.

“Are you?”

Waylon looked to Eddie Gluskin. Eddie, who had given up fighting against his bonds in exchange for contemplative silence. The technician was aware then that his rasped breathing had broken it.

“I think so.”

The older man’s eyes roamed his face. “If you do, at least we’ll go together.”

Waylon had to look back to the road but he showed the confusion on his face before turning away completely. Eddie wasn’t wounded, at least not in a way that was overtly visible.

“You’ll pass out and crash the car,” was his explanation. “Then we’ll die.”

The programmer wondered if his fellow survivor’s lucidity would ever fully return to him. They hadn’t been free long, that was true, but when he saved them would this groom get better? Could he?

“There’s a hospital near here,” Waylon said, affirmed with a sign moments later. “Leadville Hospital, see? I’ll make it.”

“I hope so,” his odd companion’s admission sounded genuine. “But you’re strong, you’ll last.” Eddie turned his head towards his window.

The signs were more frequent after that, guiding them through Leadville. Waylon couldn’t give his attention to the specifics of the shops or homes, nor whether there were people milling about, but Eddie could.

“This would’ve been a nice place for us.” He pointed a finger connected to a trapped hand. “There’s an elementary school.”

The disgust he’d buried reasserted itself with a sleek twist inside his chest. He knew that elementary school; he and Lisa had left the boys with her mother and come down to view it when he’d first gotten the job all those weeks ago. What day was it? What hour? Were they there now? Such an innocent place so close to the hell he’d faced.

He couldn’t and wouldn’t voice it. Nor would he voice that they’d just passed over the street that would lead to their recently-rented house where Lisa would be working over their computer, desperate for an answer and solution, ferocious as ever just like his ‘resignation’ letter had said.

He was glad he had no identification in his borrowed clothes. He didn’t want to see her; he didn’t want to stain her like he’d been stained. He couldn’t see her yet, because if he did how could he protect her? How could he leave her and the boys so close to danger after having them in his arms again?

But, no… his real question wasn’t any of those, because he knew how he could do those things. The question was how they could stomach him if they knew he had no intention of staying, even if he saw them, because he had something to finish, something that was more important than anything he’d ever done?

He swallowed and tried to recall what the patient had said. “I told you I can’t have a kid.”

“You can’t make one, you mean.”

The hospital was coming into view then—well more or less with how hard Waylon was finding it to focus—and he was very grateful for that. It wasn’t a large building, not by Boulder’s standards at least, but it seemed big enough for the small town. He and his wife had never had a reason to check it out. He was regretting that decision.

“Eddie,” he said, mouth dry. He pulled into the front drive of the building, directly behind an ambulance. He put the Jeep into park.

“Waylon?”

“They’re going to take us inside, and I need you to k-keep,” he had to swallow, “your handcuffs on. I need you not to fight or try to get away. Okay?”

“I wouldn’t leave you,” Eddie responded.

“Listen. You have to let them take you and help you,” Waylon ordered. He turned the key but left it in the ignition. “You have to be god and go along with whatever they say.”

“They’ll take me away.”

“Wherever you go, you’re gonna see me again, but only if you behave.”

The older man searched his eyes for hints of another lie, but he let his shoulders slacken. “I’ll do that for you.”

“Thank you,” Waylon breathed and then got out of the vehicle.

There was a paramedic, one who had been staring through their windshield, who began to approach him. Waylon took three steps and opened his mouth and then air and light seemed to spear right through his forehead, stunning him to his shins, and then to his ide when his leg flared in protest. Ultimately, he rolled onto his back, attempting to gasp away his pain.

Two paramedics, and then three and four were on him immediately. Only one spoke while the rest presumably assessed him.

“Don’t hurt—…” It was hard to speak loud enough, as if he’d expended all the energy he’d had left by standing. “Call the cops but—don’t hurt my friend…don’t let him out of the cuffs—he’ll go with you.”

There was a light shining in his eyes and the sound of medical words in his ears, accompanied by the panicked clank of metal cuffs behind them. And then his eyes needed to rest.


	2. Waylon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Waylon wakes in the hospital with questions to answer, fears to soothe, and realities to face.

            Waylon woke in an unfamiliar room. Unfamiliar, but not unwelcome. He was in a hospital, and though it took him a second, he easily recalled how he got there and why.

            Blessedly, he felt numb, heavy, but wonderfully supported by the bed beneath him. He was the right degree of warm, and hopefully equally correct in the dosage of his drugs so he could go right back to sleep. He looked to search the room first, and what he saw, briefly, was standard. He was distracted by something less so—a woman curled in the chair placed in the corner. His woman.

            Her dark hair was parted so he could see her profile. She was beautiful, of course, but in a way that hurt him to see. That made no sense to him logically, though it didn’t stop the plucking of painful strings in his chest. He’d meant to tell them not to call her. He’d not meant to let her see him so soon, and now, he realized, it may have been more for his own good then any nightmares it might have given her.

            But she was there, and had obviously been for a while. From the taste in his mouth, he’d been even longer.

            “Lisa,” he said, and the lack of volume to his voice confirmed that suspicion. He tried louder. “Lisa.” He put his hand on the guard rail and gave it a shake, though it was scarcely louder than his voice. Still, it managed to rouse his wife.

            Her eyes widened on him, brown and speckled. They glassed over when given the time to search his. “Waylon,” she breathed.

            He wasn’t sure how to begin, though that didn’t matter much considering his wife.

            “What happened?” She touched his face and his hair and then down to his hand, soft and gentle the way only a loved one could. “How did you get like this?”

            He wondered how much, if any, information had leaked down from that mountain. He couldn’t imagine any—every doctor had been mutilated, every patient most likely gunned down, and every gunman ripped to pieces by that thing—the Walrider—just as Blaire had been. But now what? Had it remained? Had it left after Waylon had plowed through the gate? If it was out, what would it do? Where would it go?

            If it was gone, and nothing was left in that asylum but patients, it was more than likely the entire situation had already been handled by Murkoff.

            His camera lay on the tableside in his peripheral; the most important evidence and testimony he had. The second sat between his ears. The third—where had they taken Eddie? He’d been in rough shape, so he had to have been kept in the hospital. He’d need to find him.

            He’d need to do so much, so much. But first, he had to do and say nothing incriminating when he was in so weak a condition. Especially to his wife and by extension his children; although he was the one confined to a bed, they were far more vulnerable than him. The only thing he could do was to tell her how he attained his condition.

            “I fell down an elevator shaft and then got stabbed.”

            She fell back into her chair, withdrawing her touch so she could place it over her mouth. She focused on the wall, a speck, maybe. He should’ve felt a little guilty that he’d been so blunt, and then blamed it on fatigue or the time he’d spent with lunatics, but his mouth stayed shut, allowing her to process her next words.

            He could hear the shudder of her breath, but his eyes had drifted closed again so he couldn’t see if there were tears. Probably not, as she was clearly trying to avoid breaking down, and he felt a warm appreciation for that.

            Her voice was even again when she spoke. “They wouldn’t let me contact you.”

            “I know,” he murmured. He’d found the correspondence that had said as much. Her tenacity might have saved him, if either of them had been aware of what Murkoff really was.

            “The police have been waiting for you to wake up.”

            He looked at her.

            “I called them early on when I couldn’t call you,” she explained. “I wanted them to investigate, but they said they have no jurisdiction at Mount Massive. I talked to some again yesterday, and they said everything was being handled.”

            “Did they watch my camera?”

            “Does it show what happened?” Lisa watched him and then wiped her eyes. “I didn’t let them come in. They’ve been talking to the man you came with.”

            Waylon started at that. “What? How can they just talk to him?”

            “Who was here to tell them no? He’s an adult.”

            “He was a _patient_ ,” he corrected. “There needs to be a doctor with him.”

            “There is.”

            “You know I mean a psychiatrist.” If they were questioning Eddie alone he could tell them any range of things: a lie, the enormity that was the truth, or something in between. The technician’s bet was on the latter.

            The only good so far was that nobody had watched his recording—not even his wife. Especially not her. He wanted to avoid showing it to anyone who wasn’t a government agent. Her safety and his dignity depended on it.

            Still, she asked: “What’s on it?”

            “Exactly what you think.”

            Lisa’s brows furrowed just the slightest evident by the single line between them. “And who is he?”

            Waylon repeated: “He was a patient.”

            “Was?”

            “When it comes to Murkoff,” he grunted, trying to lift into a sitting position but finding the task annoyingly taxing, “using the term ‘patient’ is lenient.”

            “What does that mean?”

            The programmer gave up on fixing his position on his own and instead relied on the bed to do it for him by way of its connected remote. It took a few long seconds, but his wife was still looking at him expectantly.

            “He was used as a lab rat; they all were.”

            “How?” Patience had never been one of her strongest suits, but her forward nature had been something he’d initially enjoyed about her. He’d found it refreshing that she voiced what she thought, and later he’d grown accustomed to it. He’d always considered himself patient enough for the both of them before, but after enduring what he had… well, he should be counted a saint. He had the feeling it was going to be a useful attribute.

            But patience and understanding of his Lisa’s instincts to nurture her husband wasn’t going to pull those answers out of his mouth. “Please, don’t ask me. I can’t tell you.”

            She leaned as far forward as she could. Her hands were so skinny and soft and pretty when they clasped his. “You _can’t_?”

            “I won’t,” he ground out the promise to himself.

            “But if I watch that camera I’ll find out.”

            “Did you?”

            “I should have,” Lisa murmured to herself. “I didn’t know if that’s what you wanted. They said it was evidence, but they can’t exactly take it if you’re not under arrest.”

            “It’s going to help bring down Murkoff.” She could know that much, she’d have to know that much.

            He jolted then in remembrance—he’d had more than just the video and experiences. He’d had documented evidence from the keyboards of the monsters. The question butted up against the back of his teeth before a new memory bid him clack them together. Those papers had been in his orange jumpsuit. They were gone. He couldn’t rely on them.

            Eddie had succeeded in creating a dependence on him in ways far different than he’d intended. Well, so long as the end result was the same the former-patient would be pleased to see his face again.

            “They’ve got him around here somewhere?”

            “On a different floor in a secure wing.”

            Waylon tongued the back of his teeth, the appendage so dry the tip stuck to the surfaces now and again. He needed to go see him. “Has he said anything?” Gingerly, he grasped at the cup on the bedside drawer, glad to feel it heavy and full. When he brought it to his mouth he nosed the straw out of the way to guzzle more freely.

            Lisa watched and waited until he’d drained the cup. “I only know he was asking for you. I don’t know if he said anything to the cops.”

            No surprise there. “Was? Was he getting violent?”

            “He got loud.” She refilled the cup. “They went to sedate him and he fought, but they got him to sleep. I think they’ve kept him that way.”

            “…Which is the button to call the nurse?” He lifted and scanned the remote that was connected to the bed. “I need a wheelchair.”

            “Waylon, you should go back to sleep.”

            “You don’t understand,” he said, thumbing the button, his fingernail going white with pressure. “If they make him say something, or if they try to send him someplace…” Then what? He had the camera and Eddie was legally insane. Whatever they made him say, if anything, was never going to be considered as trustworthy as Waylon’s.

            Yet, there was a debt to be paid between tem, wasn’t there? The memory of Eddie throwing himself up against that glass, terror on his features, played in his mind. He’d scared Waylon, but the fear had been for his own safety more so than the other man’s. There hadn’t been anything he could do then without getting a nightstick upside the head…and that would’ve thrown Waylon in the machine that much sooner.

            Eddie was insane, and the technician’s actions or non-actions wouldn’t have changed that. For all he had known, if he hadn’t gone along with their demands he would’ve been condemning _all_ the patients by risking himself for investigation. They’d already found everything by then, but he hadn’t known. He’d tried.

            But, still, the guilt was there. The responsibility was there—if he had played the fool and been ‘unable’ to get the programs running, for as little as twenty minutes, maybe they would’ve taken Eddie back to bed.

            And then he would’ve gone in later, his mind tacked on.

            Had there been any way to save him from the regression he’d underwent? Could he have saved any of them? Would it have been different if he had contacted Upshur sooner?

            Anxiety and remorse rolled just under his ribcage. The reporter’s fate stained Waylon’s hands with the darkest blood, and shitty though it was, he didn’t want to think about him.

            He wished he didn’t have to think about any of it, but his mind was racing and this thoughts were difficult to follow, let alone catch and silence.

            The nurse opened the door and slipped in. She was a pretty lady with dark skin and eyes. Her teeth were white and straight in her smile, and though they looked nothing alike he thought of the Groom.

            I’m glad to see you’re awake, Mr. Park,” she said. “I’ll inform the doctor. Are you in any pain?”

            “I want a wheelchair,” Waylon told her. “I need to see the guy I came with.”

            Her smile vanished and she looked to the programmer’s wife.

            “Waylon, she’s right, you need to rest,” Lisa insisted. “Please, get the doctor. He’ll give you something to help.”

            “I don’t want something,” Waylon said, wary. “I want to see Eddie Gluskin. Why are you trying to keep me from him?” What had they done?

            The nurse left them alone.

            Husband turned to wife. “What did they do to him?”

            “Way,” she was trying for soothing. “Nothing. He’s fine, I promise.”

            “Then I’m going to see him.”

            “He’s asleep.”

            “Drugged? They can stop the drugs; he won’t do anything to me. I told him I’d see him if he was quiet and let them do what they needed.”

            Lisa looked uncomfortable at that, but the doctor’s arrival interrupted anything she might say. Two nurses were with him. There was no wheelchair.

            “Mr. Park,” the doctor said, a skinny man with dark hair. “How are you feeling?”

            “I’m feeling awake,” Waylon bit. “I asked for a wheelchair to see the man I came with.”

            “Mr. Gluskin is an escaped mental patient--…”

            “And Mount Massive is in ruins.”

            “I understand, but because he is considered dangerous we have to keep him isolated and calm.”

            Waylon put his face in his palms, agitated. “He’s going to be calmer with me around.”

            The doctor hesitated. “…I’m sorry, but I was told he arrived here handcuffed to your vehicle.”

            The technician frowned up at him. “You don’t get it--…” Were they really going to make him explain with his wife’s questioning eyes on him? “That was to keep him safe from you. I was going to pass out, and I didn’t want him to attack anyone who tried to ‘hurt’ me. We’d been through shit.”

            “So he might hurt people while you’re near? Why?”

            Tired, hungry, and with pain reawakening in his body, Waylon’s agitation transformed easily into full-fledged frustration. “No; only before because he didn’t understand. Look—we escaped that shithole together. He’s a victim.” He sucked in through his nostrils. “I don’t want anyone from Mount Massive or Murkoff getting in to see him.”

            “Mr. Park, you don’t get a say in who sees him. You’re not related.”

            No, they weren’t. No words in that asylum had been real or binding, and yet…

            “They _hurt_ him. Where do you think all his wounds and scars came from?”

            The doctor went silent for a moment, and then moved to the door. “Nobody has been in to see him but medical personnel and the police; I’ll get them for you.” He left with one of the nurses.

            “I want a fucking wheelchair.”

            “Please, Mr. Park,” the remaining nurse said. “Mr. Gluskin is asleep and you’re not well enough to see him yet.”

            “I am fine to sit in a wheelchair,” he snapped, exasperated.

            “Waylon--…” Lisa touched his shoulder.

            “Listen to me.” He took her hand. “I just want to make sure he’s okay. I have to make sure Murkoff didn’t send anyone here. I’ve been out long, right? I mean, what are they saying happened up there?”

            “A fire,” she answered immediately.

            “Bullshit.” Oh, there had been one near the end, but the place had been layered in blood long before the ashes. “Their experiments went wrong—they did horrible things to their patients—they…” How could he explain? “It’s like magnified their insanity. There was no chance for them there—they were disposable.”

            “Waylon.”

            Hot-faced and fed up, the technician pulled away from her. “They’re still people, Lisa.” Eddie might not be saved, but he’d been ruled insane—he’d been sentenced to a mental hospital that was supposed to _try_. None of them had any right to decide otherwise.

            His wife’s eyes were turning red and wet. She grabbed his arm. “This isn’t about him, Waylon. Please rest.”

            He could hear incoming loud feet accompanied with the jangle of keys. “What are you talking about?”

            They stopped outside the door, voices rough but clear and unhidden—a good sign. When the door opened, a wheelchair preceded their entrance. The analyst gripped the top of the sheets covering him with intent to get up, but Lisa stopped his wrist with both hands.

            He met her eyes in question and watched a tear spill. The police were saying his name, but he couldn’t answer.

            Because when he yanked the sheets down his leg was missing below his right knee.

 

 

            They’d left the wheelchair in a corner of the room and they’d left Waylon in his bed. He hadn’t spoken with the police, he couldn’t remember if he’d spoken at all beyond telling everyone to get out.

            He’d stared out the window after that. The drugs had made him doze in and out, at one point someone had come in to change his IV bags. But, overall he stared out the window.

            His leg was gone. One screaming jump, and his leg was gone. Those antibiotics had done nothing—because he hadn’t taken enough? Because there’d been debris left in the wound? Because of all the blood, shit, piss, and jizz he’d been forced through?

            His leg was gone.

            How was that possible? There were so many obstacles ahead of him, and he was missing a leg. If he got through all of it, he’d never get to be even a fraction of the same person he once was. He’d never run after his sons. He’d never dance with Lisa.

            His leg was gone.

            He’d made it through hell and physical and mental torture hadn’t been enough, being stabbed hadn’t been enough, being raped hadn’t been enough. His leg was gone for all that struggle.

            He’d cried, though he hadn’t sobbed. There was more disbelief in him than true sorrow. Maybe because this outcome hadn’t been a consideration when he’d escaped. He’d taken pills, though they could’ve been of any origin. He’d thought he’d be fine—he’d be saved so long as he made it to a hospital.

            But he wasn’t. Nothing was magically healed like in the movies. There was pain and paranoia still embedded deep within him. So many obstacles and no leg. So many dangers and where was his safety?

            He turned from the window then and looked to his camera. There was his evidence. His insurance and at the same time his possible death sentence.

            Murkoff wasn’t destroyed with Mount Massive. Murkoff wasn’t destroyed by losing one of its limbs so Waylon couldn’t afford to be, either.

            His leg was gone, but his life wasn’t, he told himself. His leg was gone, but his story wasn’t.

            Things would be twice as hard. Recovery would be that much longer. The truth would be all the more dangerous. And he was even more vulnerable than ever before… but he could make himself less so.

            He pushed the button for the nurse, resolved, and asked for two things: a laptop and federal agents.

 

 

            They didn’t show until the next day, but that had given Waylon time to prepare himself. They were stoic men, though that might not have been their actual nature, but rather a requirement of the job. They did not sit, but had a recorder they placed on his table and notepads in their hands.

            “I want to know that I can trust you,” the programmer said.

            “Sir, we are a part of the FBI. We are here to assess the accusations you’re raising against this company and to serve justice if we can.”

            Justice was the dissolution of Murkoff and the imprisonment of the top heads involved. They’d go to jail, they’d get backlash from the media, but they’d never experience the horror they’d unleashed on others. Their jail time would be secluded and without fanatical doctors shoving tubes down their throats. These people would lose only their freedom, not be forcibly stripped of their humanity.

            Maybe. Maybe his efforts would be for nothing. Things would get ugly, but money had a way of acting as the rug evil could hide under.

            Waylon was gazing at the screen in his lap displaying the zip file he’d created snuggled into the upload bar of a website. _VIRAleaks_ had revealed several breaking stories before. The programmer had considered contacting the creators, but he didn’t know how soon they’d be able to meet and now he didn’t know if he’d be able. He couldn’t wait for either.

            And if he wanted his family to be safe, if he wanted Eddie in a proper mental hospital, if he wanted to stay alive long enough to see the outcome of his voice he had to talk now and secure it.

            “I want Murkoff to go away forever,” Waylon said.

            “Then tell us.”

            So he did.

            They kept their silence throughout his tale, except for the scratching of their pens. It took around two hours for him to get the details out, though he never hesitated in describing what he could. By the end of it he assumed they looked as uncomfortable as FBI agents could allow.

            “They’re going to be after me and my family.”

            “We can relocate you.”

            He shook his head. “My wife and sons will go to her mother’s. Where are you going to put Eddie?”

            “…When it goes to trial it’ll take place in Denver. He’ll be kept in an asylum there on secure lockdown so that he can testify.”

            The second agent cleared his throat. “…This Gluskin molested you, you said.”

            Waylon steeled his jaw.

            “Is he a source you can trust?”

            “…What he did, what he says, how he thinks—that’s why he needs to go up on stand.” What he’d been originally had been enough to get him into an asylum for life—what he was now… “That machine made all his delusions worse. It made everything worse.”

            The first agent tucked his notebook away. “…We’ll need to transfer you to a hospital in Denver and then relocate you. We’ll cover your tracks and do what we can to keep you safe.”

            “You can’t guarantee that with Murkoff,” Waylon murmured, eyeing the website again. “What about my family?”

            “They’ll be taken care of.”

            The technician didn’t believe them, but he pressed the upload button anyway.

 

 

            “How is being separated from you going to keep us safe?!” She was pacing the room as well as she could considering its size. “How long is it going to take until we can see you again?!”

            “They’re going to be after me,” he said, though he didn’t have an answer for the second question. “You and the boys need to go away.”

            She kicked the wheelchair. “The _last_ thing you need right now is to be alone. I’ll send the boys--…”

            “Lisa,” he couldn’t help but smile. “Come here.”

            His wife held her defiance for a few seconds before she acquiesced and took the hand he offered her. “…You’re going to need someone. Let me stay and help you. You’ve got physical therapy and all of this to go through.”

            Waylon searched her face and realized he wanted nothing more than for her to stay. She was stronger than he was. How was he supposed to get through any of what lay before him without her?

            But how would his kids get by without her? Who would be there to protect and support them? How would it be fair to take away both parents?

            “It’s like you said,” his voice was soft. “This could take a long time. The boys need you. You’re going to take them to your mother’s and back into school. Things are going to be normal.”

            “Normal’s a far cry from what this is,” Lisa said, forlorn. She watched Waylon’s finger over her knuckles and then kicked off her shoes so she could clamber into the bed with him. It was awkward and tight, but they pressed close together.

            Waylon pressed his face into her hair and fell asleep with her scent clearing the turmoil of his mind.

            She left in the morning, melancholic and almost mournful. She left him with a kiss and wet cheeks and took from him a message for the boys and the comfort of her weight in his arms. He wondered, after she’d been gone for a few minutes, a half an hour, an hour, if he’d see them again. He wondered if she’d keep their boys safe, but then decided she’d be better than him if their positions were reversed.

            Finally, though he didn’t feel better, he thumbed the button on his remote and had the nurse help him into the wheelchair.


	3. Eddie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Waylon is there to visit him, face worried and pale. There are questions on his tongue and sorrow in his eyes, and Eddie wants nothing more than to solve both dilemmas.

There were doctors around whenever he opened his eyes.  _Rapists_ , his mind whispered, a reminder of recent memory. But no, these men had never tried to shove things down his throat. But they had restrained him just as the others had and they hadn’t relieved him of those restraints in days.

Oh, they would change. When they demanded he be in bed they only cuffed one of his wrists to the metallic edges. When he needed to use the toilet they exchanged the bed’s rail for his other wrist. Then they would follow him into the little room and monitor every one of his movements, even those of his bowels.

It was infuriating, though he’d promised Waylon he wouldn’t fight. Waylon had been saying as much as he’d left their escape vehicle, he’d been saying as much as he fainted, and Eddie knew, oh, he knew, that his savior was still hoping it wherever he was.

Eddie had been as good as his rescuer’s word. He had only struggled at the sight of his partner’s weakened state degrading into his collapse against the pavement. Waylon’s sweet, dark head hadn’t struck the cement, but that hadn’t consoled the bound man. The smaller man was weak and needed to be protected and as far as Eddie was concerned these doctors weren’t strong enough.

But Waylon had told him not to fight and when he’d been approached by men with guns he’d been as still as he could be. He’d offered his wrists once freed and willingly swung his legs onto the stretcher they rolled out the automatic doors so that it could carry him back between them. Whatever his promise, however, he did not bring or force himself to speak with the doctors. His wounds were visible: he didn’t need to discuss them. He didn’t need to discuss a thing with them, they weren’t the police, and Waylon wouldn’t want him to.

Eddie owed him that, for his life and for their love.  _My own love_. Waylon was his savior and his darling, but the realization that his devotion may not be reciprocated had been as cold and sudden as the silver rings Waylon had used to bind him to the car just prior their escape. 

His Waylon, now within sight after so long, was very different from the one of his memories. Or, maybe not so, no, perhaps not. This _was_ Waylon, and Eddie hadn’t known him until the car, until their escape, until his head had lightened. Lightened, he thought, because it had not been some fog as was so often described in literature, but a pressure. A pressure that had been invasive and stunting, but one that he’d forgotten rather quickly in contrast to its lasting effect on him.

He remembered from before now. There had been pressures coming from the hands and drugs and mouths of the doctors, and these he had known best to heed, as one heeds their father in order to win his pride. That had never seemed to please them, he recalled. They had wanted dreams that he could control and so he told them what they’d wanted. They had not believed his fanciful fabrication, but through it he had spun a blanket of lies, one in which he’d been forced to lie.

That had caused hurting—the tubes down his orifices and the painful welts and rashes that had blossomed in response. It had been a mistake to encourage the thoughts within his and their minds. They’d violated him—they’d raped him, and that final day, that final time, after everything had been weighted…and then he’d been so suddenly angry and happy between one moment and the next. Then Waylon had found him.

Even now that Eddie was better, and surely he was, now that he didn’t have that weight influencing his mind, he was delighted to see Waylon. He could feel it, almost tangible it grew so thick in his chest. Even if his beloved had always been a man. Even so.

He looked tired and there were patches of green-yellow, the remnants of bruising, spotted on his face. He was thinner than Eddie remembered, visible in his cheeks and neck rather than body due to the loose nature of his gown, robe, and the hunched nature he maintained in the wheelchair.

Eddie shifted to rise higher in his own reclining to see if it was visible in his legs, but one was missing. One of his legs was missing.

“I lost it,” Waylon said, not a heartbeat later. His voice was empty. “It was infected.”

The former-patient turned his stare to dark eyes. “I cleaned it.”

“Yeah.” They looked away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Does it hurt? Are you in pain?”

Waylon’s eyebrows drew together. “I just said I don’t want to talk about it,” his voice snapped. Almost immediately he seemed to regret this and his face drooped. “Yes. It hurts still.”

“The doctors should be helping--…”

“They are.” The smaller man sighed and rubbed his face. He’d shaved recently and the smoothness of his cheeks contrasted with the disheveled state of his hair which had grown to hang in his eyes. His fingers tried to push it away. “Are they helping you?”

Eddie’s own head needed tending. He didn’t like the way his jaw and the sides of his skull itched.

“Your scabbing is better,” Waylon added, motioning with his fingers. The former-patient wished he had leant forward to actually touch him rather than imitate.

“I don’t hurt like you,” the patient said, relenting that much recognition of his captor’s abilities. Though he did pull at the cuff shackling his wrist to the bed.

His beloved looked to it when it clanged. “They have to keep that on you for safety.”

“Mine or theirs?”

“I guess it’s both,” was his given answer. “You don’t like doctors and you’re a criminal so they’re cautious. They said you fought when they wouldn’t let you see me.”

He didn’t sound exasperated or angry, rather he spoke the sentence as though it had been an expected fact. And Eddie would feel no shame for wanting to check on the person who had taken him out of that asylum. Who knows what sort of new place they could have come into. Waylon had needed protection before and he’d need it again, and it was in Eddie’s nature. That should have been considered romantic.

“You were gone for a long time,” the bed-confined man said in place of voicing those thoughts. It wouldn’t do to upset his Waylon now that he could finally see him. It was already clear to him that the doctors had not done their job in protecting or caring for him to the degree that Eddie himself would have.

“Yeah.” The wheels on his chair turned over once, and Eddie, pleased, let his breath out over his lips when it brought the other man nearer. “In all that time did anyone else visit you? Not doctors.”

“Yes; two policemen and two men who said they were FBI.”

Waylon’s nostrils flared briefly. “What did they ask? What did you tell them?”

“You said I was going to tell them everything.”

“What’s everything?”

Eddie felt the annoyance crease his features. Did Waylon think him so fickle? Did he think he would share all they’d been through? All that was private and theirs alone?

“I told them what they tried to do and that you saved me.”

“How did I save you?”

“You got me out,” the larger man said. “What do you think I told them?

Waylon had, at least, the decency to hesitate. “I think you told them about what you did to me.”

“What did I do? Love you?”

“You tried to-to…” here he sputtered, eyes searching as if the appropriate word could be found on the walls, “change me.”

“Fix you,” Eddie said, lowly. “You wanted me to fix you.”

“I was trying not to die! There wasn’t anything to fix! There wasn’t anything to fix with any of them!”

There had been, the patient recalled. There’d been everything wrong with them. Whores and liars, he remembered, though it felt years ago.

“You just—you wanted women to kill again.”

Eddie was lunging before he realized. There was heat behind his eyes and in his chest, but when the metal snagged his wrist and scraped at his skin hard enough to draw blood he stopped, startled. Waylon, his own eyes wide, had shoved his chair back, though he’d already been at a safe range. His breath was a sharp intake, and Eddie was sorry for the dread on his face, but he couldn’t voice it, still so close was his anger.

The man in front of him deflated then, though he did not look rebuked, more so that he did it in his own fashion. It was so sudden that Eddie had not had time to even consider the accusation weighed against him. Waylon took in a deep breath and the bound man watched his shoulders lift and drop with it.

“…I didn’t come here to get into this,” Waylon said. “You’re ill and they made that worse.”

The patient didn’t think the statement was directed, nor truly meant for him, so he kept his silence.

“I don’t know what happens from here,” his visitor’s voice continued, unstable and soft. “The world’s going to know, and I don’t know what happens when they find out. I don’t know if I made it better or worse for us… It’s not worse, but it’s not gonna be good.”

Eddie considered this. Waylon had delivered him from darkness and fog, evil and sacrifice. He had been delivered from the rape of his mind. But into what he’d been delivered wasn’t clear. He’d get help, his savior had said, but what could they help? What were they helping? His wrist was strapped to a bed and he couldn’t even touch the other man, let alone comfort him. How was that helping?

“Maybe they’ll leave you alone. I’m going to try to get them to put you somewhere safe—somewhere they won’t find you.”

“Will you be able to find me?”

“It’ll be better if I don’t.”

“No, it won’t,” Eddie said, quietly.

“They’re going to be coming after me once I testify against them. If they don’t get me before.”

“I won’t let them.”

Waylon chuckled, and it was bittersweet in tone. It made his eyes crinkle and the happy lines around his mouth prominent.

“Separating us is what they want.”

 “No; separating us is what I want.”

“Why?” Eddie bit. “Why save me to leave me?”

Waylon shrugged helplessly, spreading his fingers with it. “You’ll be safe, and you’ll get the help you need.”

He wasn’t impressed with this repetition. “If it’s so safe why don’t you stay there with me?

 “It wouldn’t be safe for me; they’d find me right away… bribe someone who could poison or drug me to keep me from talking. They’d--…” His last word was a murmured stopping point. He was staring very intently at the larger man’s shackled wrist.

Eddie wanted to say his name when the silence drew long, but lost his chance when his guest buried his face in his palms.

“Oh, God,” he sounded pained from beneath the skin.

“Waylon,” the larger man said, before the moment could escape.

The technician’s hands moved to smooth down his cheeks, almost comically since it pulled the skin down from his eyes briefly. “They’ll just do that to you. They’ll shut you up.”

 Eddie tilted his head. Waylon was the important one, the precious one.

 “And nobody will care. Nowhere’s safe for you. I was stupid to think anywhere would be.”

“You’re not stupid, darling,” Eddie admonished. “You’re brilliant and lovely.”

Dark eyes rooted him immediately in a glare. “Look at me. You’re not at Mount Massive and I’m not a woman.”

“I know where I am,” the patient responded, though he _had_ forgotten himself—but not what Waylon was. He couldn’t forget that. Even so, his savior _was_ brilliant. He was lovely and clever, more than a man had a right to be, to be sure. It also explained why he’d had such problems being demure as a lady should in their time together. The thought made him smile.

“Eddie,” Waylon recaptured his attention. “Why are you smiling? These guys never cared about helping you--…”

“I know, they were rapists.”

“—and they’re not going to have any hang-ups about killing you.”

He had been helpless in that hell, at whims he could not control nor coerce. If it were to be the same again what could he do? He had been lost until Waylon, deceptive though their closeness had been. He’d kept the smaller man safe, as well. Where he was strong and able, his Waylon was clever and determined.

“Would you let them?”

 The face before him slackened in shock, and on that blank canvas Eddie watched emotions splash, forming lines and tightening muscles as anger and pain and fear took hold. His own chest constricted at seeing the answer so hard to understand or reveal.

Finally, Waylon spoke tonelessly. “I can’t.”

 The patient did not ask for his reasoning. His hurt was melting to anger, from the pit of his belly up into his chest, and he knew it could be worse. It would be worse.

“You’ve already gotten me trapped,” he snarled, and his voice sounded as though it came from a different mouth. “After all I did for you.”

“After all you did _to_ me,” Waylon corrected. His voice, too, had gone low, and perhaps it was meant to sound dangerous. No, it just made it worse.

Eddie yanked his arm so fiercely—damn the cuts—that the bed groaned and lurched. This time the smaller man was so startled he fell from his chair, all his bravado gone in the wake of his terror, and then pain after he fell once again, having forgotten himself in an attempt to rise on a foot that was no longer there.

The bigger man hadn’t escaped his restriction, but his face still burned and his heartbeat was fast in his throat. He wrapped the fingers of his free hand around the chain and gave it a jerk. He tried this twice more before he stopped, piqued by the sounds his ears had caught between the metallic clanking.

Waylon’s good leg was curled underneath him, balancing his weight. His other was in his hands, his fingers circling and frantic over the wrapped stump. Every part of him was trembling, and he was sobbing.

 “…Took my fucking leg.”

Instantaneously, the anger inside him was replaced with sorrow. His poor Waylon.

“Darling,” he said, and then chanted, “darling, darling.”

Waylon slapped his hands over his ears so harshly Eddie winced. And then one was fumbling with the wheelchair, attempting to pull it closer, but he couldn’t get himself back into it. He slid and sprawled, and then he reached up and wrenched the chair, overturning it into its wheel before he started kicking it away with his remaining foot until he could no longer reach it.

The struggle had turned him away from Eddie, and he watched the shiver of his shoulders and the curve of his neck as he bowed his head forward.

“Waylon,” he said, reaching. “Darling.”

He turned to look at the outstretched hand, his face pink and his eyes lightened a shade due to his tears. But still, he lifted his fingers and touched the pads of them, once and twice over Eddie’s.

There were rushing footsteps in the hall and Waylon recoiled. “I don’t _want_ to touch you! I don’t want this. I don’t want any of this. I want to go home. I just wanted to leave.”

The door cracked open, frightening the hunched man so much that he struggled when the doctors attempted to right him. Eddie stretched further, swiping his hand at the air to get at the nearest white coat. His rescuer had settled in their grasp, but that wasn’t the touch he needed. That wasn’t the comfort he sought.

 “Drug him.”

He wasn’t sure whom they meant, and he snarled. “Stop touching him! Don’t take him away!”

“No,” Waylon came to himself then, though he was muffled by the body of the doctor settling him back into his wheelchair. “He didn’t do anything; it’s fine. He’s been drugged enough.”

But a doctor approached his IV and stabbed it with a syringe anyway.

“Mr. Park, we’re taking you back to your room.”

“No, wait--…”

Eddie jerked his arm violently and repeatedly, startling the doctor at his side away and drawing the attention of the one who sought to take his darling from him. “Don’t take him away. I can’t be alone!” He struggled, and there was a circle of fiery pain around his wrist where the metal bit.

“Eddie, stop! Stop! I’ll be back when you wake up!”

He was feeling tired, as those rapists intended, so that they could drag Waylon away from him, after too short a time. After too brief a contact.

“He needs me,” the patient growled, but his arm was lowering and he could not stop it. He sucked in air through his nose and settled his chin on the bar of the bed, too hot and enraged at the image of Waylon being turned away and wheeled from him.

Before his eyes closed, he saw the dark eyes peering back at him over his shoulder before the door shut him away and his own eyes shut away everything else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your patience! I got on a big writing kick today, thankfully. I hope this was worth the wait (and as emotional as I wanted it to be.) Thank you for reading, thank you for waiting, thank you for understanding.


	4. Waylon II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Waylon's gaining allies, forming more concrete answers for himself, and planning a future that may never come.

“I’m fine,” Waylon lied, taking over his wheels in the hall. He wanted to occupy his hands and pretend they weren’t trembling.

The doctor allowed it and slowed his own pace to match. “Mr. Park,” there was a sigh to it, “he attacked you and we can’t let you see him again. We’ll need to transfer him immediately.”  
“He didn’t attack me,” the programmer protested. And with his stomach roiling, he had to admit he believed his own words, though he knew it was wiser not to trust such a sentiment. Eddie had wanted to be free—and maybe it would have been as it had in those shadowed halls, lightning fury and then drizzle-like, soft touches quick to atone for any brutality.

The guy was dramatic enough to have made old films his paragons of wisdom, attested by his behavior and sudden, fierce embraces.

“Mr. Park…”

“Look, he surprised me and I fell out of my chair. I was the one who made all the noise.” All that noise and rage; he’d wanted to destroy his fucking chair after he couldn’t get back into it. When he’d kicked it away he hadn’t wanted to get back into it, never again, and even now he loathed the feel of it. “You can’t just send him away.”

“When he’s physically capable I can,” the doctor countered.

“He’s going to be a bigger problem if he knows I’m not nearby,” Waylon informed him.

He was regarded closely for long, detaining moments. “Why are you enabling him?”

The technician closed his mouth so hastily his teeth clacked loud enough for the sound to rebound off the walls and back into his ears. His cheeks burned in shame and he didn’t attempt to speak again. Thankfully, instead of continuing to prod the raw and incomprehensible flow of Waylon’s thoughts, the doctor left him alone in his room to fester.

It was simple: Eddie couldn’t be saved. What did saving him even mean? For whom was he saving him? Eddie couldn’t understand or appreciate what the programmer wanted to do for him. He wouldn’t understand being placed in another asylum—another prison for him. Could he get better if he didn’t understand why he was so reprehensible to others in the first place? He wouldn’t accept being taken from Waylon’s side.

Nobody else cared if Eddie lived. Nobody else knew he existed, save Murkoff employees, the families of his victims, and those who remembered shocking newspaper headlines. The majority of people in any of those categories would prefer him dead; less taxes spent on attempted rehabilitation and less information to snub for the shady corporation that way.

So, he had to be saving Eddie for himself. But how much sense did that make? Why did he still feel such a sense of obligation? Duty? Why help his rapist when he would’ve been fine with his death had it happened in the asylum? When he’d even been wishing for it?

Again and again; again and always he knew he’d wonder about this. Can you save everyone? As long as they were breathing and sweating and eating could they be saved, get better, change? When did trying cross into hopelessness?

In Eddie’s case, how much of I was by his own volition, if any? Did he want to get better for himself or for Waylon’s approval? Did it matter the reason?

“No,” he answered out loud, a murmur though it was the utterance did more for his conviction than his swirling thoughts ever had.

He’d wanted to stop those experiments, to help those people. It hadn’t mattered that it had been because of his own unease and guilt rather than some sense of philanthropy. It had been wrong and eventually he’d come to see that through the veil purposefully thrown over his eyes.

Eddie would never live his life outside of a psych ward and Waylon would never hold his wife or boys again, but they could upend Murkoff. And not for morality’s sake—Waylon was no hero, nor brave, nor did he feel a clichéd righteous pull to do what was ‘right’—not anymore.

They could get revenge. They could get justice, a revenge of sorts though not the kind he wished he could enact. There was no power in the world that could give him every last Murkoff employee’s head on a platter, so he’d settle for what they could get: bankruptcy and jail for some of their enemies, hopefully ruined lives for them all. What was there to lose at this point?

They had only each other, and really not even that, in the end.

 

The FBI prosecutor was thrumming with energy, almost tangible to Waylon whom was made all the more mentally and physically exhausted by it on top of his anxiety, drugging, and the beginnings of rehabilitation. Her eagerness had been obvious prior to their meeting, considering that it had only taken two days for her to show up, briefcase and laptop in tow.

He slept more than he would’ve liked in her presence, though that gave her time to watch his greatest shame, her soon-to-be damning evidence in all its digital horror. It gave her time to strategize it, or so he figured in his waking moments when she was either hunched over a legal pad or clicking swiftly across her laptop’s keyboard.

She was a determined-looking lady, though he might not have been in the best mind to truly say. Determined to keep a high-profile case and its publicity, most likely. She was in her fifties and obviously one of the best at what she did. She dyed her hair an auburn color to hide her grays. She had arched brows over reflective brown eyes, a long nose, and lips that seemed mismatched with the top being so much thinner than the bottom. Most of these features were tense, enraptured in her work. She must have always been as such, judging by the lines around her eyes, mouth, and decorating her forehead.

He knew, even in his state, that she was fierce. He could trust in that quality to go for Murkoff’s jugular, but not for it to care about his or Eddie’s well-being.

“What’s your name again?” Waylon managed to croak one day when he felt more alive than usual. There was water next to his bed and he reached for it. As he sucked hard through the straw he noted how he had felt no tenderness during his movements. A better day than the others.

“Isabel Fuentes,” she replied without looking up, and Waylon liked how her accent changed around the name. Her fingers clacked for a few more seconds and then she straightened and gave him a smile he supposed was meant to be reassuring or tender. As with most things lately, it only unsettled him. “I think after all I’ve seen we should be on a first name basis.” And that explained it.

Waylon watched her silently, wanting her to make the first move. Eventually she did, but only after an interruption caused by a nurse who placed a less-than-appetizing lunch in front of him with fresh water. When he left and the technician was prodding at some limp vegetables Isabel placed her laptop aside and crossed her legs at the ankles.

“Waylon, I need you to understand that investigations and trials of this magnitude may take some time.”

He swallowed a bland carrot and then speared another. “By ‘some time,’ you mean months? A year? More?”

“A year would be the fastest.” She opened some of her files. “These people will cover their tracks, they’ll hide, and when we corner them they’ll fight.”

Waylon stabbed a bite of chicken but left it on his plate. “The worst of them died at Mount Massive. The ones we’re after now are the ones who funded it. They think they’re safe.”

“Rich men hiding behind their money,” Isabel agreed.

“I don’t want them to be safe. I want them to go to jail. I want their lives ruined.”

“I can guarantee that,” the prosecutor said. “The evidence is overwhelming.”

The chicken was equally as bland in his mouth, but he chewed it as though it weren’t, giving himself a moment. He speared another piece and did the same before setting the fork down and leaning back against his pillow. “There’s something else I want. The investigators made me a lot of promises.”

“About your family?” She held her hands up with her palms down and then moved them in a downward motion, as if smoothing the air. “They’ll be safe. Given aliases and moved.”

Waylon laughed darkly at himself. “And I never get to see them again. Great. Thanks. Not what I meant.” He turned his face towards the window. “I’m going to need to testify?”

“Yes,” she answered. “The defense will call on you.”

“Then after you’ll put me in witness protection, too?”

“Yes.”

Then I deserve to get what I want, for starters and enders. “They want to move Eddie Gluskin from here. You can’t let them.”

Isabel blinked, eyebrows high and lines of her forehead prominent. “I’ve been informed that he’s dangerous.”

“There has to be a different part of the hospital they can put him in? We need him to be calm, and he’s going to be the opposite once they move him away from me.”

The attorney looked down and distinctly uncomfortable. “For your safety, I think he should be moved.”

“We’re in separate rooms with the FBI hanging around; I’m not worried about it.” He looked to her and after a moment she met his eyes. “He’s insane, I get it, but we need him as evidence if nothing else.”

The older woman stood and heaved a sigh. “I’ll talk to the doctors. He’ll be transferred to a different part of the hospital, still.”

Waylon nodded. “There’s another thing.”

“Still something to do with him?”

Another nod. “After the trial, I don’t know where they’ll put him.”

“A secure, unnamed medical facility for the rest of his life.”

Something occurred to him then, jolting worry through his torso. “They won’t put him on trial for the asylum?”

“Under law he is considered mentally unfit. He is legally insane.” She moved some more papers around. “With the information you’ve given us about the tests, procedures, methods, and machines used it’s fairly clear his insanity was…” she waved a hand, seeking a word in the ceiling, “intensified. I don’t know how they managed it, but they did, and any trial would refer him to the same punishment he was meant to serve for the rest of his life.”

“Another asylum.”

“A medical facility that will be thoroughly checked. He’ll most likely also be given a new identity.”

“Where?”

This caused her to pause. “That hasn’t been decided yet. Under witness protection the safest thing would be to move you both out of state.”

There was another request-demand on the tip of his tongue, one that unnerved him to have even made it as far as that. He bit down on the appendage ever so gently with his teeth.

“Anything else?”

He gave himself a moment and tried to resume eating but the food had gone cold and he felt no hunger. “We’re both going to heal before the trial; we won’t be staying here.”

“Mr. Gluskin will go into a ward in the capital with twenty-four hour protection and you’ll be placed in a nondescript hotel or boarding with similar surveillance.”

It felt as though there was a small, but spreading, puddle of relief in his chest, grown and calming by the end of her sentence. It was the best they could hope for, he knew. Living through the asylum to become Murkoff’s most damning evidence had been the last thing he’d wanted when he thought he was going to die, besides seeing his wife and family one last time. Now he may never have the latter, or maybe Lisa would try and find him in a few years if things settled down and he survived that long. Maybe she wouldn’t.

Maybe Murkoff wouldn’t be able to track him down and kill him. Maybe they would. Making it to the trial to testify, which would be hard, he knew, would be nice. And he couldn’t think of any other word but nice. Staying alive after that? A blessing, maybe? Though when you lose your family and the happiness you once had he didn’t know if it counted as a blessing. He supposed he wasn’t religious enough to say.

He had told himself, though they had taken his life, his leg, that he would fight. He couldn’t let a depression cloud his thoughts of the future. What else did a person have? He and Eddie had revenge to get and if depression was going to rear its head then Waylon would combat it with his anger. Constantly supervised, kept from his family and home, told where to go and when, what to eat—yeah, he could probably keep that anger up for a few years. Long enough for it to matter.

Waylon shook himself, remembering his guest. It seemed as though she had sensed his introspection, however, with the way she was quietly observing him. After a few moments she began to tidy up her things.

“Waylon,” she said it in what must have been her ‘gentle’ tone. “I know you’ve been through a lot. I know you’ve lost a lot.” In theory, maybe. You’ll never actually know. He thought this and other dark things but let her continue. “We’re going to put them away. We’re going to get you justice. Things will be hard for a while, but you can do this.” I know. “I’m going to make things as easy as possible for you. You worry about getting better and I’ll do the hard part.”

Waylon couldn’t help laughing at that.

 

“I don’t know if they’ll have you testify,” the programmer told Eddie when he was allowed to see him two days later.

The larger man was still shackled to his bed, but the doctors and nurses hadn’t mentioned any other outbursts. There was color back in his face, but as far as lucidity in his mind? The blue eyes looked both critical and dazed at finding Waylon propped in that wheelchair in front of him once again. The younger man had even been welcomed with a grin that had morphed into and remained a lazy smile.

“You want me to? If they ask?” There was even less of a lisp to his voice.

“Yes.”

“Then I will,” Eddie promised.

Waylon fiddled with the armguard of the wheelchair. “The trial won’t take place for a while… we’ll be healed enough to leave the hospital long before then.”

“Where will we go?”

“You’re going to go to another facility in Denver, and I’m going to a hotel or something. We’ll both have people to protect us.”

The strong brow before him furrowed. “I’ll protect you.”

Waylon gave a pointed look to the handcuff and was only slightly relieved, and astonished, at the sheepish smile he was given.

“I meant we are safer together.”

The technician slouched back in his seat. “We’re going to the same city. That’s enough for now.”

“And after?” Eddie asked, voice strained. “After that they’ll let us be together?”

“After,” Waylon murmured, trailing off in thought, watching the bed-ridden patient’s boxy chest rise and fall with worried breaths. “…After they’ll move us again. They’ll change our names so nobody can ever find us and hurt us. I don’t know where they’re sending us.”

It wasn’t a lie, and it seemed to appease the other man. His smile was back and he reached out with his free hand towards Waylon who had rolled himself within range if they both stretched enough. The officers outside glanced in through the window now and again, but his body and the chair would block sight of the movement.

So he slipped his hand into the larger one.

Eddie gave his fingers a gentle squeeze and then began stroking his knuckles with the pad of his thumb. His eyes followed the motion, his face etched in thought.

“A facility,” he said after a while. “That’s a nice way to say ‘psych ward.’”

Waylon pursed his lips and then shrugged a shoulder. “Yeah, that’s why I said it.”

Eddie laughed, pressing his fingers together tenderly again. The technician gave his own small chuckle and let a smile linger for a moment before looking down and away from their hands.

“We’re going to check this place to make sure they’re clean. That they’ll actually try to help you get better this time.” The words felt hollow coming out, though perhaps they didn’t sound so.

“Can I get better?” Icy eyes were waiting for his when he lifted them.

He didn’t have an answer and he felt his mouth smack open and then close a few times. He didn’t know. “…Tell me about before the asylum. Before they made you go there. Before they caught you.”

“You mean when I killed those women?”

Waylon flinched but resolutely did not pull his hand away.

“They said I did that because I was sick.”

“You were. You are.”

Eddie frowned. “…I didn’t want to kill them all. They kept making mistakes. They had to be punished.” He looked confused, and his hand twitched against Waylon’s as if he wanted to pull it away and touch his forehead but he didn’t.

“They didn’t. You hated them. You hated women.”

“No,” the retort was angry. “I wanted to find the one. I wanted to find the perfect wife, how could that be hating women?”

Waylon was the one squeezing this time. “You can still want them but hate them. You killed them. A lot of them.”

Eddie’s throat bobbed several times.

“Why did you hate the things they did?”

“Because they were wrong.”

“Who told you that?”

He did pull his hand away after that question. In fact, the patient turned his entire body away. Waylon watched the way his shoulders tensed, the way his fist balled. He waited for the anger, but when it came for the first time he could remember since those assailants in the asylum, it wasn’t directed at him.

“Before that, when I was young my father--…”

“You don’t have to tell me about that,” Waylon interrupted, catching on with a jolt. “That’s not---that wasn’t your fault.”

“They said it made me sick and that’s why I couldn’t help myself.”

And maybe they’d been right. Maybe it had been the defense they used. Waylon didn’t know how much damage being betrayed by the people you trusted most in such a disgusting way could do. In his readings Eddie had never seemed to plan his killings. They had seemed impulsive; perhaps he had taken these girls on dates and they’d made a wrong move. Enough to set him off. Maybe they’d been too scared to placate him the way Waylon had managed. Or maybe Waylon had been lucky because of how warped Eddie’s mind had been at Mount Massive. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

“But my one wasn’t a woman,” the quiet revelation snapped Waylon back out of his ever-oppressive mind.

“Don’t say that,” he demanded.

Eddie looked at him, sharply. “I’ll say what I want.”

The programmer shook his head and rolled his chair back.

“I remember what I did to you. I…It’s fuzzy but I was there…sometimes I was there.”

“What does that mean?” Waylon’s heart beat began to race.

“It was me, and the me before that they tried to make better.”

That was no clearer to younger man who just stared helplessly.

“I was there but I think I could only watch.”

So being a prisoner of his mind? All the wretched parts brought forward and enhanced while any rationality, what little of it those men had ever had, was buried deep. They’d been exposed to those experiments for so long… how long would it have taken to bring the darkness out of Waylon?

“Tell them that,” he said, his voice cracking, “when you have to testify.”

“I’m telling you that,” Eddie’s voice dropped low. “And I’m telling you about the one who is trying to save me after all I did.”

“You saved my life in the asylum, what did you expect me to do?” I made the choice to stay alive. I left you to die and you followed… and to live I had to let you keep following.

“And you saved mine, too.” Those eyes bore into him, straight into his head and down through his veins and nerves. His chest clenched with clamoring, rivaling, unsure emotions. “And now it’s after. Why are you still saving me after?”

Because you saved me. Because I need you to testify. Because maybe you can get better. Because maybe I felt guilty for everything I did. Because it’s all of those things.

“I’ll let you know when I figure it out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you've enjoyed this chapter. I'm hoping to update weekly now, if not every other week (I will try my best for the former). For those of you waiting for the next chapter of After the Awful it will be posted tomorrow. I meant to get it up at the same time as this but my family has just been a bundle of medical issues lately, which is why it wasn't posted last week which had been my plan.
> 
> Again, apologies for how long you've had to wait. If you're back to reading please know that I will never be able to articulate how much I appreciate it.


	5. Eddie II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie meets Isabel, recounts his horrors, and learns one of Waylon's secrets.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've changed a few things about when/how/why Waylon blew the 'whistle' to fit with the story.

Eddie didn’t like her.

She drew her eyebrows too strongly and her lips were too pink. She was far too old to be painting herself like a whore. Too old for the vibrant color of her nails reflecting the lighting with every rapid tap against her laptop.

He didn’t like the typing or the questions.

And his Waylon realized it, if his sharp looks were anything to go by. The looks a mother gives to a child to keep him in line. Waylon would have made a good mother.

It had been explained to him that she was there to help them. There to make sure they went somewhere together. There to make sure the people who hurt them paid for it. He still didn’t like her attitude and fake smiles. He could see the fear behind it all.

He especially didn’t like nor want the fake sympathy after he’d recited what had been forced upon him in that mountainous hell.

“Can you specifically recall the things they did?”

“Yes,” Eddie said curtly.

The woman looked to Waylon.

“They’re going to ask you in court,” his savior said. “They’re going to try to discredit you so you have to be as specific as possible… I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” the bed-bound man murmured gently. “I remember.”

His love’s dark eyes searched his face. “What happened to you and what happened to the others.”

“And what happened to Waylon,” the lawyer interjected.

“We have my video camera for that.”

“We’ll need his side of it.”

“His side of it is that he was delirious because of what they did—…”

“And I need him to speak about it to show that he isn’t anymore.”

Waylon clamped his jaw shut at this, the muscles straining briefly before he leaned back in his wheelchair with a sigh. Eddie regarded him and his discomfort for long moments before speaking.

“If Waylon doesn’t want me to speak about our time together, I won’t.”

The woman shook her head. “What Waylon wants is to put these guys away.”

“So, you have to tell them,” Waylon conceded. He waved his hand at Eddie’s doubtful look. “It’s okay. Tel them what happened and then tell them what you told me.”

The former patient nodded. He had promised he would. If this was the way to keep the smaller man happy and safe, he would do it and anything else asked of him. If this was the way to keep them together, he’d say anything.

“Can you explain it to me, Mr. Gluskin?” Although he did find her voice especially grating, doubly so because it had snapped him from his thoughts.

“What?”

“Why you did what you did in the asylum.”

He cocked his head. “Protect Waylon?”

“I…” She glanced to the mentioned man. “Yes, you protected him, but everything else.”

“Everything else.”

“The other men. The surgeries… The…” She trailed off and shifted in her seat.

Eddie stared at her until she dropped her gaze and then he stared some more. Why he did what he did? Why he killed the men who had tried to hurt his Waylon? Who had tried to destroy their home? Or why he had killed the liars? The false flatterers? …The ones that, now that his mind could breathe, he knew were men? He tried to remember if he had known then. Had he known with Waylon?

 _No_ , his mind whispered, _no, my Waylon had wanted the change_. But, no, that voice was wrong. Hadn’t Waylon said as much recently?

The whore would have to work for those thoughts, though. “I killed the men to protect Waylon. They hurt him.”

“Which men?” The tapping resumed in her lap.

He felt his brows draw down and together. “The ones who _hurt_ Waylon.”

“Towards the end,” the smaller man supplied, clearly sensing the ire in his counterpart’s tone, “there were a group of men that broke into… into Eddie’s… home.”

“ _Our_ home,” Eddie corrected, tone weighted. “It was our home. They broke in and were going to hurt Waylon so I killed them all.” He glanced to Waylon to see if he had believed the lie, but there was no emotion there except the resigned face he’d been hiding behind for this little meeting.

There had been quite a few in their home, yes, that had been true, but he had dwindled their numbers until only three had remained. And of those Eddie had only killed two. He had remembered being scared—no, terrified—for the first time in so, so long. Terrified because although two of those _animals_ hadn’t been able to get by him, one of them had—and though it hadn’t been the largest of the trio, it had been a man much larger than his darling. And Eddie could do nothing. And how was he to know what would happen to his sweet, pure, pacifying lover? How could he fail in protecting her—him? Even now his heart thumped irregularly at the thought. What if it had all gone differently?

And at the time he could have done nothing. Not until he had cleared his path. And he had, oh, he had in such a blinding, panic-induced fury. He’d slashed and pulled and punched and stabbed and relished the feel of blood and gore on his skin and under his nails.

But somehow, he’d relished it even more when he came upon the bald body at the bottom of the stairs. He had relished the bloodied mouth, the lack of teeth, the deformed angle of the nose—but not as much as the deformed angle of his neck. He’d landed and it had all been over in a moment. _Too sudden_ , Eddie had thought—still thought! But the knowledge that his wife, his world, his heart was safe had ensured the smile upon his face.

But, he hadn’t told Waylon. And he wouldn’t. Not because he feared that his rescuer would be held responsible. No, he feared—and yes, he feared _again_ , he feared again _for Waylon_ because if he found out about it how would it affect him?

He was barely holding it together. Even Eddie could see that. The whore must’ve seen it, too. And yet, what had she done about it? Besides ask these prodding questions, deep and personal and uncomfortable that drained the remains of color away from Waylon’s face.

He could feel the anger building from the bottom of his sternum, just beneath his lungs and from there it would spread over them, up through his neck, and then onto his face, visible in the clench of his muscles and the steel that overtook his eyes. Anger at the callousness displayed before him. A woman should know better!

And yet, Eddie fought as hard as he could to keep it down.

He promised. He promised he would try. And though this _bitch_ was careless and thoughtless and cold, Eddie would not be. Eddie would not dredge up memories and truths that would only drag Waylon back down into the dark where they lurked. Let them remain, let only what needed to be excavated and revealed to the light be so, and let all the hurt that could be buried by Eddie be so forever.

“Eddie?” Waylon was looking at him, forehead creased in questioning worry and fingers curled white around the railing of the bed.

He smiled because it was easy to do so for the smaller man. “I was thinking how worried I was for you.” The former patient held out his hand.

Waylon looked to it for a weighted moment but did not take it. His own dropped back from reach into his own lap where his eyes watched it interlace with its twin. His lifted his gaze to find the lawyer’s and then it promptly fell back down.

Eddie looked to her, but he had already felt the weight of her dull eyes on his offered palm. They were the eyes of a judging whore who knew nothing. How could she? There were lines and wrinkles of distaste and disapproval around her eyes and mouth. Eddie hated her more. Hated her for the judgement and hated her for the shame she made Waylon feel.

“I see…” she said, eventually. There were long stretches of typing. “So, you were acting in defense of Waylon… What about the men who came before Waylon found you?”

“What men?”

She hesitated. “The-the ones you mutilated. The ones you… transformed to look like women. The ones who you performed surgery on to make them into women. The ones you hung up.”

“They were women,” Eddie told her.

Her pencil-brows drew together. She flipped through a file folder beside her, though Eddie knew it was simply so she didn’t have to look him in the eye. “There were no women in the asylum.”

“Not physically.”

“What?”

“Eddie,” Waylon interrupted. “Stop it. Tell her what you told me last time I visited.”

Eddie let his head roll along his pillow to regard his _one_. He continued to watch him as he answered, and his Waylon watched right back.

“The fog made my mind think they were women.”

“…The fog?”

“The fog that made it me but not me.”

“The effects of the therapy for the Engine,” Waylon said quickly. “They had to get the ‘subjects’ ready for the Morphogenic Engine. They had to get them right on the brink of complete insanity—I saw it for myself when I was fixing the computers. I read it in their files and e-mails. They wanted to get them to lucid dream to control that _thing_. It’s why they picked the asylum—that and they thought nobody would care about a bunch of insane, murderous patients.”

“Fixing the computers?” Eddie parroted.

Waylon looked to him sharply, eyes widened.

And then the older man recalled it. He recalled his fists pounding on immovable glass and those dark eyes in that beloved face staring as he’d been dragged away. Yes, now he remembered. They had met before, his mind before had remembered it, too, though in a different way. His mind now couldn’t remember what his mind then had.

But now, now he remembered a technician typing away at a computer while tubes had been shoved down Eddie’s throat. While he’d been forced into another world. It had been _his_ technician.

“But this procedure didn’t work with Mr. Gluskin?” the woman asked, ignoring the older man’s question.

 “No,” Waylon jumped on her interruption, turning his chair to her. “…The scabbing on his face is proof of that. If the molecules they shoot into their bodies don’t… uh, don’t combine with the patient’s cells then you get all these growths and…” He gave a subtle motion to Eddie’s face.

“Does he have any growths?”

“No. For a while I think it was working and then… then it didn’t. Maybe because he was in better shape than the others he only had the scabbing? I don’t know.”

“So, back to this ‘fog,’ as you describe it, Mr. Gluskin. It made you think they were women? But why did you kill them?”

The rage had been rising while they discussed without him. It boiled up and through the barrier he had attempted to place on it, bubbling and burning up over his lungs, tightening the tendons in his neck before the heat shot up to his face.

“You fixed the computers so they could do that to me.”

The younger man’s shoulders tensed and then slumped a second later, giving in to defeat. Then he turned to face Eddie, face drawn tight. “I was the I.T. guy for Murkoff.”

The cuff bit into his wrist, the only indication he had moved for he had not planned it. The woman shot up, closing her laptop and setting it aside in a hurry to get to Waylon’s side. She yanked his wheelchair back, though Eddie had yet to fully reach for him.

“You think I’m going to hurt him?” Eddie asked, anger spiking. He could feel the weight of it in his brow, the pull of it at his temples. “Get out, you stupid whore. You’re the one hurting him. Hurting us.”

Her mouth gaped, ugly like the rest of her. Then she spun the wheelchair towards the door, which caused its occupant to protest. Eddie didn’t hear his reasoning, he only saw the way her suit jacket flared out within his reach. So, he grabbed it and pulled.

She squawked, an ugly sound, again, so, so ugly, but that was the only one made in the room. She was out of shape and top heavy and she fell easily within the curl of his good arm which he flexed around her throat. Her breath left her in a gasp and her legs kicked out, a high-heel spiraling silently across the floor after her initial jerking. Her nails clawed at his bared skin, but he was watching Waylon and the way he frantically attempted to maneuver around. He only made it half way before his pleading began.

“Eddie! Stop! They’ll sedate you and never let you see me again!”

“See you?” Oh, he saw. “I do see you,” he voiced. “I see a liar. I see who you’re really trying to save.”

Waylon cast a glance to the door and the officers who had yet to look in. “If they see they’re going to shoot you. If you die, you kill me.” He turned back. “And if you kill her, you kill me because Murkoff will find me.”

Eddie tightened his arm, hating the panicked breathing of the prosecutor and wanting to stop it. “You would have let them kill me.”

“You fucking idiot,” Waylon snapped, and the tension in the patient’s arm loosened in jolted surprise. “The only reason you’re here is because of what I did to save you and all those other patients. You let her go and you listen to me. You said you love me? Fucking prove it.” His nostrils were flared, a deep flush spread between the height of his cheekbones, though Eddie didn’t know if it was due to the mention of emotion or the programmer’s panic... and he was beautiful for it. And the parts of Eddie that remembered foggy happiness wanted to listen while the clarity of anger wanted the bitch under his arm to die.

In the end, it was the clearest part of him that had wanted to be together with Waylon that decided it. He lifted his arm and disinterestedly watched the old whore slump to the tile. She gasped for breath and began to quietly sob.

He thought it odd, how subdued it was.

His Waylon, newly fearless, rolled to her and drew her away. She shuffled after him, but remained on the floor, face in her arms to muffle her sounds.

“Isabel,” Waylon said. “Tell me now if he’s ruined everything.”

She took a long time to answer. She shuddered and attempted to lift her head a few times and the smaller man stared ice at Eddie the entire time. Then, finally, she spoke in a voice, wretched and wet.

“...You said…” she swallowed a hiccup, “that he was lucid.”

“He is. He can’t control his anger because he was never treated. They made it worse, don’t you see that? Didn’t you see it before?”

She put a hand to her throat. “…You said he’s better with you.”

“Well, he did let you go,” Waylon quipped.

The bitch shot him a furious look. “I should walk out and--…”

“Go ahead,” the technician interjected. “Walk out. Let us get killed… or let the case of the decade go to another prosecutor.”

She tried to keep the glare in her face but the furious trembling of her body almost immediately subsided and Eddie knew Waylon, clever, sneaky Waylon, had caught her. She replaced her lost shoe and had the decency to take his hand so she could stand. Once she was back to her feet she quickly withdrew from him.

“I’m sorry,” he added. “He won’t touch you again.”

“I’ll never be close enough to let him try,” she spat. “Get him under control.” She gathered her things and began to stalk to the door.

“Clean your face, dear,” Eddie taunted.

“Shut up, Eddie,” Waylon hissed.

The bitch glared over her shoulder. “I’ll be back tomorrow, Mr. Gluskin. Attempt anything again and I’ll explain to the doctor what a danger you are to Waylon.”

Eddie felt the darkness take over his face and saw the fear it induced in her eyes. She quickly escaped to the hall. He could hear her speaking loudly with the officers until the loud clicks of her heels no longer echoed in the hall.

The door opened a moment later and one of the officers stepped in. “What happened?”

“I told her it wasn’t a pretty story,” Waylon offered.

The officer, whose face was nondescript, moved to the programmer. “That so? Let’s get you back to your room.”

“Not yet. I have to talk to Eddie alone.”

“Don’t bullshit me. You think I’m leaving you in here with how she looked?”

“Yes, if you wanna keep your job.”

The cop laughed. “And what are you going to do?”

“Don’t know yet,” Waylon shrugged. “Let me get on my laptop and see what I dig up.”

There was a beat of silence, a beat where he saw the uniformed man puff up as if for a fight, and then he deflated. “Listen, buddy, I know you’re stressed out--…”

“Please,” Waylon tried. “Just go back outside the door. I need to talk to him and he won’t talk if you’re in here.”

The officer regarded Eddie with a distinct air of discomfort. “…I’m going to be watching from the window. If I see any sudden moves, I’m tasing him until he shits the bed.”

“Fair enough.”

Once they were alone again Waylon rolled into his reach, fingers shaking but head high. “You’re a fucking idiot. You almost ruined everything. Everything I gave up would’ve been for nothing.”

“What did you just call me?” Eddie asked, voice low. His anger had only recently cooled but could easily reheat and burst to flame.

“You heard me, and you’ll probably hear it more. You’re a fucking idiot.” Waylon didn’t flinch or pull away when Eddie reached out and dragged his chair to the bed until he couldn’t get them any closer, no, he kept talking! Undaunted and determined and adamant. “We need her to help us.”

“ _You_ need her to keep yourself alive,” Eddie snarled, wrapping his fingers around the programmer’s wrist and squeezing.

“Are you going to listen to me or hurt me?”

“I never wanted to hurt you.” No, no, that had been his clouded mind remembering from before, from the women before. “You make me.”

“No, I don’t. I didn’t. None of them did.”

They had, the whores. Even the old whore had. She’d been the reason for all of this, for the anger, for the gaping rift between them now, for the clenching hold he had upon his beloved. But Waylon, pretty, lying Waylon, he was at fault, too.

“You helped them do that to—…”

“Shut up and listen to me.”

“Stop talking to me like that!” Eddie started to twist the arm in his grip.

“I’m not going to act like a woman! And the only reason anybody’s scared of you is because of how big and strong you are. But you’re not in here. And in here, I’m not afraid of you,” Waylon’s voice wavered only slightly to betray the pain he felt. “All I have to do is jerk away and you heard what’s going to happen. All you have to do is let go and listen.”

The rage was shaking through the patient’s hands, was shaking up into his mind, confusing his thoughts and wants. Eventually, it shook his fingers loose. He’d been afraid, hadn’t he? He hadn’t wanted Waylon to feel that—it was such an awful feeling, such a stressful feeling. Wasn’t that what he’d been thinking? Why was it so hard to think through the heat in his chest?

“I made computer programs for Murkoff,” Waylon admitted, pulling back and rubbing his wrist. “I didn’t know what it was going to be used for. It…” He sighed. “How do I explain this to you?”

“I know what computers are.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” the technician huffed, burying his hand in his hair. “…I had to create programs that talked to each other. New programs from the ground up; it’s why they hired me. I’m good at what I do.” He stopped and then gave the tiniest and sweetest of smiles. “I’m the best at what I do… The programs were supposed to help report on some new therapy they were trying out. They don’t explain the specifics to the I.T. guys.”

 _Let this be the truth_ , Eddie thought immediately, thought furiously, thought hopefully. _Let it come to light and then be reburied. Let me believe you._

“They paid good money, and I didn’t know anything until two weeks in when I started hearing rumors. But they were just rumors… and then they called me in to fix the program while they were working on a patient. This was before you… I didn’t see what it did. They shoved me out the moment I fixed it.”

He lifted his eyes to look to Eddie, then he took a deep breath and blew it out. Then another and another. “I hacked into their systems: reports, documents, e-mails, everything was open to me… I just couldn’t send it all out. The file size would’ve been too big, but I sent out e-mails.” Then something seemed to come to him and he was raking his hands through his hair again. “Shit, I sent out too many e-mails… I sent them to whoever I thought could help get evidence. One reporter, he…”

“Go on,” Eddie whispered, desperate to hear and believe.

Waylon cleared his throat. “I sent all of this out right before you. Right before I fixed the program when it was your turn. If I hadn’t they would’ve known… I thought they would’ve known and killed me or something. Didn’t matter, though, did it?” The question was to himself. “They knew anyway. Maybe they saw I was hiding away with a laptop, maybe I fucked up covering my e-mails. I don’t know, but they caught me and threw me in the machine. Another test subject and the only reason I didn’t turn into… the only reason it didn’t get me was because that _thing_ got out.”

The programmer sank back into his seat and turned his head away. Eddie watched his adam’s apple bob, watched his eyes grow wet, watched his bottom lip tremble. And then he watched, enraptured, as the small man sat up straight, steeled his eyes with a furious blink, and turned back. “I helped them hurt you and the others. I… the reporter died because of me.” He shook his head. “This isn’t about me. I know I probably won’t make it out of this. This is about setting things right. For the patients. For you. It’s about justice. For the people who are dead… For Upshur.”

Then Waylon laughed, a small, deprecating little thing. “But a lot of it’s about revenge.”

Eddie couldn’t recall ever having heard his beloved speak so much. He couldn’t recall if he’d ever been so proud or grinned so wide. “I want to kiss you,” he told his savior.

Waylon grinned back. “You’ll never kiss me again.”

The cuffed man sighed sadly, his heat replaced with bittersweet warmth. “Oh, how I love you.”

He received the sweetest of surprises, of gifts, when questing fingers slipped under his own. He grasped them tight and leant forward to press his mouth to them, damn what he’d been told.

“I’ll never doubt you again,” he promised to both his love and himself. “I wish I wouldn’t get so mad.”

“You and me both,” Waylon whispered around the softest of laughs.


	6. Waylon III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Waylon and Eddie finally leave the hospital and take the next steps towards self healing, towards the trial, towards an unsure future.

            To his surprise, Isabel _did_ return the next day. She was wearing a scarf, but otherwise looked none the worse for wear. She had that same dutiful, determined look in her eyes and the programmer respected the hell out of her for it. It made him almost regret his dry responses the day before, almost… though he couldn’t think of another way he could have or would have acted in the moment as he was now. He couldn’t say whether he’d ever stop feeling so jaded.

            As a prosecutor, maybe she was just as jaded.

            “How are you?” he had asked anyway.

            She set her bag down and took a deep breath. “I had a doctor check me over—some bruising, but I’m fine.”

            Waylon nodded. “He doesn’t like strong women.”

            “And I don’t like angry men,” she retorted hotly, “but I don’t turn my back on sick people or leave those who need my help.”

            It was on the tip of his tongue to quip that she must’ve learned that lesson yesterday, but because he really appreciated the second sentiment he wisely kept his mouth shut.

            “Waylon,” she sighed his name and then took a seat. “I can’t promise anything if he acts up again.”

            “He won’t.”

            “You say that.”

            “He won’t. I promise.” _I’ll take care of it, of him._ He’d find a way to curb his anger like those doctors never did.

            She searched his face and then turned to her bag to withdraw a packet of paper. “We have investigators gathering evidence at Mount Massive, although obviously the documents you recovered and your footage is damning enough.”

            Waylon nodded tiredly.

            “I’ll need time to go over everything” she continued. “My team and I need to build up this case and, as I’ve told you, it might be some time before the trial. What I need you to do is help me with Mr. Gluskin.”

            “I said I’d make sure he wasn’t angry,” he reminded although he had just said as much five seconds ago.

            “It’s not his anger towards me. They’re going to use that to their advantage up on the stand…”

            Waylon had considered this. “They’ll try to do something like that to me, too?”

            “Yes, but you’ll have my team and I to guide you. Do you think anyone else could coach Mr. Gluskin?”

            “At this point? No.”

            “What about the doctors?”

            “He hates the doctors here--…”

            “I mean psychiatrists,” she interrupted gently.

            “…You said the new ward he’s going to is in Denver,” Waylon said, piecing it together even as he spoke. “You and your team work out in Denver.”

            She nodded along with him. “You can be released and he’s ready to be free of those handcuffs, I’m guessing. You’ll be provided for and protected there until the trial. They’ve already enrolled you at a clinic for physical therapy.” The lawyer handed the packet over to him finally and allowed him a few moments to flip through it. “Your location will obviously be secure, as we promised, and under constant surveillance.”

            “And Eddie?”

            “He’ll be transported separately and put in a maximum-security facility where you’ll be able to visit. Those visits will be monitored.”

            Waylon thumbed over his own housing and rehabilitation information to the ward’s pages. Isabel let him read, patiently waiting, he guessed, to answer his questions. The place looked alright, though he might’ve said that about Mount Massive in ignorance. When he turned the page, he found that his lawyer didn’t intend for him to be ignorant, after all—she had compiled reviews, resumés and CV’s, reports, and official inspections from the place.

            “It looks too good to be real,” he said.

            “No mental hospital is perfect,” she told him. “That comes with the territory, but this is a _real_ hospital with qualified doctors who want to help.”

            “Eddie’s going to spend the rest of his life there.”

            “Yes,” she confirmed. “But if he works with the doctors…lucid patients live…”

            “What? A real life?” He couldn’t stop his slight laugh.

            “As close as someone like him can get.” Or deserves, she didn’t say.

            And really, what choice did they have anyway?

 

 

            “It’s a good place,” Waylon told Eddie later. He could tell from where he sat that the larger man was getting stir crazy. He was sitting with his legs over the side of the bed, arm still strapped and trapped. In his free hand he held the papers the programmer had been reading two hours ago.

            “They aren’t like Murkoff,” he continued. “They have regular inspections to make sure they’re following all their regulations. They gave me a laptop and I looked into it—only a few incidents but nothing involving torture or death… so that’s a plus.”

            “Mm,” Eddie made a noncommittal noise at the joke and looked up after he was finished. His face and eyes were clearer, his demeanor agitated but not yet angry.

            “They’ll let me see you every day?”

            Waylon gave him a tired smile, a smile he suspected was going to become his normal smile. “You’d get sick of me if you saw me every day.”

            “No, I wouldn’t.” The older man didn’t return the smile. “I want to see you every day.”

            None of that information had been discussed with him, most likely because Isabel herself didn’t know. The new doctors would have notes from previous studies but they’d want to do their own evaluations and treatments. From there they’d decide how much, if any, social interaction Eddie could have, especially when it came to the current person of his obsession.

            “I don’t know,” Waylon said truthfully. “We’ll have to see what the doctors say.”

            Blue eyes roamed his face. “Can I say no?”

            “No.” Court orders dictated the patient’s life now, and after that every decision would come from his doctors. It was justified—he’d always be dangerous, after all, wouldn’t he? It was justified to take choice from someone who took it from so many others. No matter if he could get better, and who was the programmer to say? None of that could erase his past actions. There was no room for second chances for murderers in the real world.

            The older man had been silent through Waylon’s introspection, as he often was. It wasn’t clear whether similar, rapid what-ifs and philosophical dilemmas were streaking through his mind or if it was just something people could detect in his face now. Thinking back on it, Isabel had a knack for allowing him long stretches of silence in the middle of their conversations.

            He couldn’t recall ever having been that way, lapsing so deeply into his mind, except for necessary moments in college or at work when that silence was crucial to the success of his computations and installations. But he had never been that way with people. His time in that asylum, second guessing whether his next sentence would get him killed, hell, whether breathing the wrong way would get him choked, had clearly changed him. He didn’t know if it would be forever.

            Or maybe the questions in general had gotten harder. He couldn’t remember thinking so much, worrying so hard, even when his eldest had asked if there really was a God.

            _My life, their lives, my revenge—none of it had been on the line then._ But would he be able to get them off the line? Could this trial miraculously save them? Could it just fix everything?

            Eddie shifted, the muscles under his hospital gown stretching and pulling. He craned his neck to each side and produced several loud, cracking pops—rituals one does upon waking.

            “I hope they won’t always keep me chained to a bed there,” he said.

 

 

            Reportedly, Eddie made the drive in near-complete silence and with no mishaps. Waylon’s own transportation to Denver had been filled with Isabel’s voice. He answered questions that he was comfortable answering in front of the officer driving them. Thankfully, the prosecutor lapsed into silence when they got close to the city. It had been a while since he’d been, and though he had intended to track their path he found it too difficult to recall the route once they finally pulled into a hotel parking lot.

            The place was nice, as was his room. It had already been prepared for him, including a few groceries in the corner and a full closet of clothes. And most important was the Witness Protection agent waiting for them inside. He provided Waylon with a credit card, for starters, and the explanation that his stay in the hotel may last up until the trial. It was paid for, because eventually Waylon would be given a new identity. By the time everything this entailed was explained to him, his head was spinning.

            Sensing this, both Isabel and the agent agreed to leave him alone for the night, reassuring him that there were people on his floor and that their room numbers were by his phone before exiting. After several moments Waylon let the thought that it was the first time he’d been alone, truly alone in too long. For a while he tried to savor it by remaining on the bed, but his eyes too often strayed from the cartoon on the television to the wheelchair nearby, his prosthetic leg, his crutches, and the cane all propped within reach. Eventually he chose the crutches and hobbled to the shower.

            There was a seat in it and he sat there under the hot spray and tried to let the heat soak deep into him. But again, his eyes roamed to the only thing that could distract him when he was as nude as he was: his stump and the empty space where his leg used to be. He looked from his remaining leg and then back to the nonexistent.

            The decision to cut it off had been made to save his life, he knew, but he often thought, bitterly, that he was the one left with the aftermath: the depression, the denial, the phantom pains.

            The first never seemed to leave, and though he’d had bouts in college (who hadn’t?), he had nothing but the pills to battle it. Since those did about nothing for him, he wondered if that was another thing that would magically disappear after the trial.

            The second haunted him at night when he fell from the bed after rising to take a leak or after standing from a seat after a blissful moment of normalcy where he’d managed to forget his situation for at least a few seconds.

            The third was random; he couldn’t guess when the pain would shoot up his leg, would throb and ache at the stump, would twinge and scratch all down a shin and into a foot he no longer had. He couldn’t soothe the pain—how did you soothe a limb long lost?

            He’d signed that limb away—maybe it was being studied, but more likely it had long since been burned to ash. Seemed to be the only real way to get rid of infection, as attested by that forsaken asylum.

            He put his palm over the scarred skin and tried to fight back the tightness in his chest. In the end, it took until the water had turned cold and his skin red.

 

 

            Isabel set his cup of coffee before him and then retook her seat across the table. Waylon muttered his thanks but continued to pick at the cinnamon roll on his plate. No matter how little sleep he had gotten, he wasn’t keen on burning his tongue to stave off fatigue.

            “You’ll be given a phone which will be covered and unlisted with full access to the internet. Your agents and I will have the number and you’ll have ours if you need us,” Isabel informed him. “You’ll also have the number to your rehab clinic.”

            “What do I do about food?” he asked. “Get fat off room service?”

            “You can go shopping for yourself if you don’t like what the agents got—just use the card you were given. I think we can arrange for you to use the hotel’s kitchen if you want.”

            “Probably.”

            “I’ll talk to the agents about it.” She sipped her coffee and left lipstick in her wake. “Is there anything else you need?”

            “How often are you going to be in contact?”

            “Regularly, but I won’t pester you every day.”

            No, he’d have rehab every day. He had spent a good portion of his time in the hospital relearning how to walk. It hadn’t been going terribly, but it seemed so hard to bend his knee, to put that false foot correctly on the floor. He had fallen too often because he’d slanted the plastic to the wrong side or because he’d missed entirely. They’d told him to practice around his room, but when given the choice he’d plopped his ass in that wheelchair. It was easier to put those crutches under his armpits and hop, but using that prosthetic on his own still seemed so daunting.

            He’d done it for their breakfast, though, if only to make his pants look as normal as they could with a stick for a shin. Still, his crutches had done all the work.

            “And Eddie?” he asked. “When do I see him?”

            Isabel straightened in her seat. “The doctors want a week to do evaluations without any outside influences.”

            They wanted to know what they were working with. They wanted to know how their patient behaved alone with them, to see how he behaved before and after seeing Waylon. A wrong move and they could decide to cut off any visitations.

            “How was his first day? Can you check in on him?”

            She nodded. “I can. I was told he was very solemn for his first day. He didn’t want to talk.”

            “Is that going to affect anything?”

            “Like? They can’t force him to talk, and it’s only the first day.”

            Hoping she was right, Waylon finally reached for his coffee.

 

 

            Their interim week turned out to be a combination of agonizing rehabilitation and mind-numbing boredom (at least halfway through until they _finally_ gave him a laptop he could keep).

            Waylon didn’t know why he had suddenly tripled his effort in relearning how to walk with what he grudgingly came to call his new leg at his therapist’s insistence. He was a dark-skinned guy around the programmer’s age named Jerome. He had a bright smile and an infectious laugh and Waylon recognized his relief and gratefulness immediately at having another support on his side, even if Jerome would never realize his impact.

            He’d caught onto Waylon’s newfound determination and urged him with both discipline and patience. Even when the technician became frustrated or stumbled for the third time in twenty minutes, the therapist never expressed frustration. Although he knew this was his job, Waylon had to ask him how he kept his cool.

            Jerome explained that he had been in college when a basketball injury had sent him to rehabilitation. He’d switched majors and now he got to help people. Besides, he explained, he could still play basketball whenever he wanted. He even coached a kid’s team.

            Waylon thought about that a lot during the week. The only time he didn’t think about it was when he was actually trying to maintain a decent gait around the track in the rehabilitation center.

            “Keep bending your knee, your body will remember where to put your foot,” Jerome had said. Eventually, he was right.

            Again, Waylon wasn’t sure why it was so important that he walk into that mental hospital with the new leg and his cane as support. One of his agents did follow behind with the crutches, but there was a resoluteness in him to not ask for them. He didn’t dwell on why and his agent didn’t ask.

            They didn’t make him wait long before he was approached by a pale, blonde woman in a lab coat. She extended a long-fingered hand to him.

            “Mr. Park? I’m Dr. Wabel.”

            Waylon shook her hand, stupefied and silent for a heartbeat. Just a heartbeat. “ _You’re_ Eddie’s doctor? Are you kidding me?”

            Her brows began to draw together.

            “No,” he interrupted before she could get the wrong idea. “I think I remember your resumé: you’re a good doctor. I believe it, but the guy hates women—especially women who are good at hard jobs.”

            She studied him. “I see. You’re worried that he’ll attack me?”

            “Piss him off and he just might.”

            Dr. Wabel finally smiled. “We’re doing everything in our power to make sure he isn’t antagonized. To reassure you, I am _one_ of his doctors. I tend to make observations and final decisions while direct contact is up to Dr. Henry Fischer.”

            Waylon nodded, abashed. “I just don’t want anybody to get hurt.”

            “I agree with your assessment,” she placated. “We came to the decision fairly quickly after reading his history. Our contact has been minimal. It’ll increase when we see progress.”

            He followed her, leaning heavily on his cane as she swiped her card key to get them behind the front desk and into the actual ward. His agent, an athletic looking man in his late thirties named Joe, followed silently.

            “I guess a week isn’t enough to see progress,” Waylon commented idly, glancing around at the clean hallway, at the tidy and serious-faced nurses passing them with medications and clipboards, at the soft-spoken doctors with concern-lines in their foreheads.

            “Not usually,” she agreed. She took them into a small room. There were two chairs and a couch centered around a table. The doctor took one of the chairs and Waylon instinctively took the couch seat across from her. Joe remained by the door, setting the crutches against the wall.

            “Can I get either of you something to drink?” she asked.

            At the shake of Joe’s head, Waylon declined.

            Dr. Wabel nodded and looked down to her clipboard. “As you’ve said, a week is not enough for progress… however, we haven’t had any altercations. I have to admit that we had anticipated some trouble from Mr. Gluskin.”

            The programmer snorted. “I can’t fault you for that.” He slipped a hand into his pocket just to wrap his fingers around his phone. “So, he’s been calm… Does he actually talk?”

            “He has regular meetings and conversations with Dr. Fischer.”

            “What about?”

            “Mainly you,” she said and he could almost see the way her eyes narrowed. It made him feel like he was being watched by a hawk from hundreds of feet up, like there was no escape. He supposed it wasn’t too far off a metaphor.

            “Asking to see me?” he avoided.

            “Yes, but also praising you as his savior,” she said, refusing to accept the avoidance.

            His non-leg was starting to itch and he made to reach for it, forgetful under her gaze before he withdrew his hand. “Yeah, he tends to do that.”

            “How did you save him?”

            “I didn’t save him. I just didn’t leave him to die, I guess. I didn’t have a choice: he followed me.”

            She crossed her legs and leant forward. “So, he’s idolizing you.”

            “Big time,” Waylon agreed. “What else does he talk about?”

            “The bare minimum concerning his interests and needs. We get a little insight into his original murders. What he won’t talk about is the asylum, except for you. I suspect we’ll have to work up to that. Best to start at the beginning, anyway.”

            It was on the tip of his tongue to ask what he’d said about those original murders, but he turned away from it both mentally and from her gaze physically by looking around the room. “I want to see more of this place.”

            “Of course,” she said. “I’m sorry, I thought you’d want to sit for a while.”

            “Walking’s better for me right now,” Waylon lied. He and Joe followed the doctor out of the room.

            She led them down halls and through communal rooms, explaining as she went how patients were treated and how they spent their time. It seemed there were plenty of activities to keep them occupied. There was a nagging feeling at the back of Waylon’s mind that there was too much freedom here and once they reached yet another set of double doors, thicker than the last with another keycard terminal, he realized he was right.

            Dr. Wabel flashed her card and led them into the maximum-security wing.

            Here she encouraged them to stay close and calm—that no patient went unescorted or without monitoring. As they made their way down the halls, Waylon risked looking up at the doors lining one hall. Each had a thick, square window at the top. From several of these eyes stared at him.

            It was in this hallway that he stumbled, a full-body shudder causing one misstep with that fake foot, sending him reeling to the floor before Joe could drop the crutches and get to him. He landed hard on his hip, but was physically fine. His pride, on the other hand was something he didn’t want to discuss.

            He was grateful, then, that nothing was said as he was helped back up, nor when he refused the crutches. Instead, with his face red, he continued on, overly focused on his footsteps until their guide took them into another room. Again, there were cushy chairs and a couch. This time, however, Dr. Wabel sat beside him.

            “Mr. Park,” she began, hesitating. “Have they put you on medication? Something for your PTSD?”

            “Yeah,” he croaked.

            “Have you taken it today?”

            “Yeah.” Probably why he hadn’t also pissed himself in that hallway.

            “These visits might be a bad idea. We don’t want to trigger your--…”

            “I told him I’d visit,” Waylon interrupted.

            “You’re worried about the trial,” she deduced. “I understand, but having you visit may set any progress he makes back. Exposing him to… to someone with whom he has an unhealthy fixation is dangerous for him.”

            The technician couldn’t help but laugh. “You know what he called the doctors in Mount Massive?” At the shake of her head he obliged. “He called them rapists, that’s how bad it was for him. He didn’t want to be touched by doctors again, but he did it in the hospital and he came quietly now. Why?”

            She caught on quickly enough. “Because you asked him?”

            “Exactly.”

            The doctor looked to her clipboard again, though he knew she was considering words that weren’t there. “We didn’t tell him you were coming today. We can’t leave him unattended, but do I have your permission to listen in on the conversation?” She motioned to the mirror he had only briefly acknowledged behind him. “You aren’t a patient so I have to ask.”

            “If it’ll help him, that’s fine,” Waylon agreed immediately.

            “Thank you,” she said. She pulled a phone from her pocket and tapped away at it with her thumbs before returning it. “Dr. Fischer’s bringing him now. They were in the yard.”

            “The yard?”

            “We have indoor and outdoor areas where our patients can exercise. As always, they are monitored, but physical activity has been proven to reduce stress and help with depression as well as other mental illnesses.”

            Waylon nodded. He bet Eddie had appreciated access to it after all that inactivity in the hospital. “…You guys actually try here, huh?”

            “People don’t choose to be sick, Mr. Park.”

            “No,” he whispered. “But it doesn’t bring back all those dead people. How do I live with that?”

            She blinked, obviously dumbstruck and Waylon was saved from his shame by the sound of the door unlocking. He was rising to his feet with Dr. Wabel before he realized, struggling only briefly as a stocky man entered. His hair was brown and short, peppered with gray as was his stubble. He had small brown eyes and a large nose. He gave a polite smile and nod to Waylon before stepping aside.

            Eddie hadn’t exactly been hidden behind him, considering that he had several inches over the doctor, but his eyes had been downcast at the restraints on his ankles and wrists, as if pondering why they were there. When he finally looked up he gave a brief, cold look to the only woman in the room before he saw Waylon.

            When he did, when he registered what was happening, he stopped completely in his tracks, all the ice melting away and a smile of relief, one that reached his eyes, one that made his adam’s apple bob, took its place across his mouth. He looked as if he had truly believed he’d never see the technician again.

            “Waylon.” He swallowed thickly. “You’re walking.”

            “Yeah, they gave me a stick to help me walk on the other stick,” he joked to alleviate the tension.

            Eddie took a large step forward, fully intent on sitting beside the smaller man, only to be redirected to the chair diagonal from his place on the couch. There was a second where he clenched his fists, but then he raised his eyes to Waylon’s again and sat down.

            Dr. Wabel assessed the silence that followed before she excused herself. The door clicked quietly behind her.

            “Mr. Park,” the male doctor said. He crossed to the chair across from Waylon and held out his hand. His shake was firm and quick. “I’m Dr. Fischer.”

            “Nice to meet you,” Waylon said, sitting back down. “That’s Joe over by the wall. Supposed to keep me out of trouble. Don’t know if it’s his real name.”

            “Does it hurt?” Eddie asked, eyes on where his leg had disappeared from his line of sight.

            “To walk? No. Sometimes I get phantom pains, but it could be worse.”

            The patient gave another smile.

            Waylon nodded for lack of anything else to do and then glanced to the doctor, expecting him to make a comment. Like Wabel, he was watching the technician closely. There was a pen in his hand hovering above his clipboard.

            “… How are you?” Waylon looked to Eddie. “How is it here?”

            “Not the same,” the older man acquiesced.

            “I heard they’re letting you work out, so that’s a plus.” He frowned, unhappy with the way he was exchanging pleasantries just because they were being watched. “Food taste good or is it crap?”

            “It could be better.”

            “Yeah, it’s real rough when you’ve got people cooking for you.”

            Eddie smirked at him. “Waylon has a clever tongue. I’m glad you’re feeling well enough to joke, darling. You look tired.”

            “Didn’t sleep much,” the younger man muttered, tracking the way Fischer’s eyes lifted at the endearment. The scratching of his pen grew swift.

            “You’ll get used to that,” the patient said. “The writing. He’s always writing. Maybe he thinks writing will help me.”

            “They’re trying to figure you out,” Waylon supplemented. “Maybe it’s the most you’ve talked all week.”

            “I talk.” His reply was almost indignant and it made Waylon laugh which in turn made Eddie’s eyes soften. “I wish _we_ could talk alone.”

            “Never gonna happen again. But, being honest in front of them means they can help you more.”

            “Do you believe that or did _she_ tell you that?” The patient nodded behind him to the mirror.

            “…She’s nice; promised me she’d help you.”

            “They study me, not like before, but it’s all the same.”

            “Not this time, I told you.” Waylon shifted his weight forward to put his elbows on his knees. “I mean it.”

            “Can I touch him?” Eddie asked Fischer without looking at him.

            The doctor was clearly uncomfortable with the idea. “I can’t give permission for Mr. Park, but it’s a long way to reach.”

            “Don’t push it,” the technician warned.

            “They keep asking about you. Wanted to give him something to write about.”

            Waylon felt his brows raise. Maybe this week had been good for Eddie, maybe he’d regained some clarity or even normalcy with all the distractions around them. Maybe he hadn’t had time to dwell on everything that had happened like he had when chained to that hospital bed.

            “Yeah?”

            “I missed you,” Eddie said, voice heartfelt. “Is it going to be like this every time? Did they decide I can only see you once every week?”

            “They didn’t decide anything as far as I know.”

            “I did what you asked,” there was frustration rising in his voice and that tightness beginning to pull at his face. “I answered their questions and only hit the table when I was angry. I let them give me pills. I’m letting them listen.”

            “Eddie,” Waylon tried to calm him.

            “I only want to hold your hand,” Eddie said slowly, tone just beneath fury. “Is this it, Waylon? Is this what I let you lead me into? I see you across a table once a week until that bitch prosecutor finishes the trial? Then what? Then I rot here?” He tugged on the cuffs connecting his wrists harshly once and then again.

            “Eddie, you’re going to hurt yourself,” Fischer said, beginning to rise from his seat.

            “It’s okay,” Waylon said to both men. He shifted carefully down the couch, bit by bit with his weight until he was across from the larger man. He held out his hand.

            “Mr. Park—…”

            “I said it’s okay.”

            Eddie scooped his hand up immediately, fingers squeezing and massaging. His eyes dropped to follow the motions.

            “I told you what this is all about,” Waylon told him. “You’re going to get the help you need here and we’re going to tell the truth at the trial so we put the assholes who did all that shit to us away.”

            The larger man dipped his lips down to his fingers and Fischer started almost violently.

            “C’mon,” the technician said. “It’s not that bad here. You didn’t even get _that_ mad this time. This place must be helping.”

            “You’re the only one that helps.”

            The words forced a sting through Waylon’s heart, soft and sudden and guilty. “Listen to me. I wanted you here because I wanted you to get better for you.”

            “Why does it matter who I want to get better for?”

            And, well, that shut the programmer right up. It even sent a sliver of pride through his chest and he had to eye Fischer to see the gob smacked reaction there before it was swiftly hidden away. There were facets to Eddie he hadn’t discovered yet. They’d have an interesting next session, that was for sure.

            “Waylon,” Eddie murmured. “Don’t leave me alone. I can’t be alone.”

            He had screamed something similar in the asylum, back when his mind had been distorted and warped out of control. When all his desires and urges and the dark parts of his mind had been amplified and extended to cover everything else. His loneliness had been one of those parts. Maybe it had never gone back to its right size.

            Waylon returned the pressure on his fingers before withdrawing. “Gimme a sec.”

            “It hasn’t been enough time,” Eddie interjected, rising and ready to protest.

            “Hey, I said a second. I’m not going anywhere for a while, just want to talk to the doctors in the hall.”

            With no option but to trust him, the patient sat back down, cuffs clinking as he dropped his hands back into his lap and watched the three men leave the room.

            In the hall Waylon leant on both his cane and one of the walls until the door shut behind them and Wabel joined their group. “Well?” he questioned at her approach.

            “’Well’ What?” Fischer asked.

            “I see your point, Mr. Park,” Wabel admitted.

            “What point?” her partner demanded.

            “Eddie’s behavior this week seems to be linked to a promise he made Mr. Park. What he said in there confirms it.” She regarded them both. “If we only allow weekly visits he may regress.”

            “Or increased visitation will make him more volatile,” Fischer argued. “His anger spiked because of Mr. Park. There may be fluctuations because of their interactions.”

            “He calmed down fairly quickly when Mr. Park explained--…”

            “Call me Waylon.”

            “—When Waylon explained the situation. Gluskin responded _emotionally_. He’s been robotic all week, you said so in one of your reports.”

            Fischer mulled over her words and the technician could very clearly see the closeness and trust in their partnership. “I was surprised,” he admitted. “He wasn’t obfuscating. He was almost a different person.”

            “He’s not stupid,” Waylon told him. “He was just going with the motions. Did the same thing until they started torturing him more in Mount Massive.”

            Wabel nodded at him. “I had worried you’d appear as some kind of—forgive me—‘reward’ for his good behavior. That’s obviously not healthy, but…”

            “Yes, I was struck by him actually stating he wanted to get better for Waylon, too.”

            “For now,” she said to her partner, “I think it would be beneficial to see the real Eddie Gluskin. Visitations every three days seem appropriate.”

            “Twice a week,” Waylon said. “What happens when that doesn’t cut it?”

            “One step at a time, Waylon.”

            Funny, Jerome had told him the exact same thing.

**Author's Note:**

> There may be a few discrepancies between the prologue and the last chapter of 'A Gentleman,' but they shouldn't be too large to completely annoy anyone, hopefully. 
> 
> In Waylon's Resignation, the first document picked up in Whistleblower, Lisa and the boys live in Leadville, which is the closest city to Mount Massive in real life. Supposedly, they moved there from Boulder once Waylon got the job. I had thought about changing this, but I'd like the story to stick a little closer to canon. We'll be seeing a bit of Lisa, but this story is still focused solely around Waylon and Eddie, almost tragically so. I hope you enjoy, and thanks for sticking with me.


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